“They were looking for the map.” I kept my voice low as a couple of workers moved across our path, carrying long-handled shovels as they headed for a suspiciously humped patch of ground.
“I saw,” Abioye said with a grim look on his face. “How bad is it?” He cast a worried look around, but we appeared to be, for the moment, un-regarded. I hunkered down as if I were excavating something, and Abioye joined me. I pulled out what remained of Lady Artifex’s map and showed him.
“Pretty bad,” I said. It was torn neatly down the middle, and we had the side nearer to the mountains. There was the Crow—or the Broken Thumb—and there were the next set of landmark guides—but of the Vault and the smudged circle that we thought meant the Stone Crown itself, there was nothing.
Abioye gave out a low groan of frustration. “It will be impossible for us to find it now!”
Hang on, I thought, wasn’t that a good thing? If we couldn’t find it, that was nearly as good as us finding it and destroying it, wasn’t it? “But without half of the map—then Inyene can’t ever find the Crown either!” I pointed out, cursing myself for not realizing this before.
But then again, my second thoughts countered just as quickly, who were the others who had stolen half the map? What were THEY going to do with the Stone Crown if they found it?
“Unfortunately…” Abioye shook his head at my side. “She had a copy made before we left.” His tone was miserable. “She’ll just send out another expedition, and another, and another, until she drives her way through…” His eyes went far. “She’s always been like that, you know; relentless.”
“I can see that.” I thought of the brands on my arms. Although they were given me by Dagan Mar—he had been employed by Inyene, hadn’t he? That was why he had done it in the first place. But Abioye had even worse news to come as well.
“And if I return empty-handed, she’ll never let me lead the next expedition,” he insisted. “And as for all of the workers…” He raised his head to look at the other Daza and Westerners around us. “Inyene has never liked failure,” Abioye said bitterly.
They would be lucky if they got to spend the rest of their lives in the Mines, I thought. Which probably went for me—as I was walking a fine line being the ‘official’ Daza guide right now…
“Okay,” I steeled myself. “So we head onwards. I’ve studied that map. I can remember what I saw, and I know the stories of the land around here. We could meet with the other tribes and try and work it out for ourselves…”
“Without the map?” Abioye shook his head. “This is hopeless. We’ve lost.” He was tired, and his spirits were flagging. Perhaps last night was the first time he had ever seen so much death.
“Have you?” Ymmen suddenly asked me pointedly with a burst of dragon fire. I was surprised at the question—and even more surprised at my answer. Of course, I hadn’t. There had been the battle at the Keep, but I had never been in a full skirmish before, had I? Why did I feel relatively strong compared to Abioye? Why wasn’t I at my wit’s end?
It probably had something to do with the fact that I had at least seen my fair share of dead bodies before. Death was no stranger to the lives of the Plains, and one of the many duties of an Imanu was to tend to those who had passed away—seeing to both the body that they left behind, as well as the proper departure of their soul. There had been times of great tragedy when more than one body, sometimes three and at once four, of my fellow Souda had been rushed back to the village, fallen due to wild animals or enemy raids. During such terrible times, my mother would need help—and even though she would not give me the grisly task of tending to the corpses, I had still been present and busy.
But Abioye had probably never seen this much death.
“We bury them in the sands, unless someone objects,” I said, ostensibly changing the subject for Abioye.
“Huh? How did you know?” He blinked at me as if I had guessed precisely what he had been thinking—that we were all going to die out here, and that there had been too much death already.
“A Daza thing.” I shrugged, and this time when I said it, there was no hint of the scorn or swagger that I had used before. “The dirt will form a good enough resting place, and the Plains will take care of their remains,” I said solemnly, nodding to where there was already sprouting a haphazard field of shovels or spears, sticking out of the ground where one of ours had been found.
“Good,” Abioye nodded, although his voice sounded unsure.
“Abioye—” I reached out my hand to touch his shoulder. “We can do this,” I said. We have to do this, I was thinking.
Abioye’s clear eyes met mine, and I saw that although yes, they were tired—here was also a new glint of light in them now. A hardiness that I had only seen during the Keep fight was now there. Maybe it was because he was still wearing the torn and crumpled clothes of last night and didn’t seem at all bothered by the state they were in, or because of the way that he didn’t look away to yawn or fiddle with the cuffs of his shirt. He looks like he’s growing up, I thought. Becoming the sort of leader he wants to be now that he’s not under his sister’s thumb.
“The raiders,” he said in a firmer voice. “Not Daza, not bandits… But they were heading straight to the command tent, and straight to get that map, so…” He frowned as he tried to work it out.
“But who else knows about the map at all?” I pointed out. Tamin and I had been the ones to find it, after all. And Abioye himself had claimed it, to try and send it to the King of Torvald and keep it out of his sister’s hands—but she had gotten hold of it before he could put his plan into motion…
“It has to be someone at Inyene’s ‘court’.” He said the last words with a grimace of disgust. From what little I had seen, Inyene’s Court appeared just full of hard-eyed men and women like Dagan Mar, ruthless, and near fanatical about their ‘Queen’.
“Who would any of them act against Inyene?” I asked, and Abioye shook his head in confusion.
“Precisely. But whatever the answer is—they were trained fighters, and they knew what they were doing. They have half the map, which I guess must mean that they want to find the Stone Crown for themselves….” Abioye said.
“And their half is useless without ours,” I whispered. “They’re going to come back.” It was the only logical answer. They might have the far side of the map—but between there and here were many leagues of wild savannah. They would have to follow us as we followed the near part of the map before they could use their own…
“I’ll scout.” Abioye stood up abruptly. “I can get up high on the mechanical dragon and see if I can spot them.” His eyes took on that hardened look again. “They’re probably resting right now, as most of our group are after the battle…I can make sure that they never bother us again.”
You’re going to use the mechanical dragon’s fire against them? I thought. For some reason it made me feel queasy. The mechanical dragons weren’t ‘true’ dragons at all. And I didn’t think a true dragon would just attack from the air suddenly.
“No,” Ymmen agreed. “We dragons know that we only need to risk wing and bone when our young, or our meat is in danger.” He said, quite wordy for a change. “Most of the time a good roar scares off anyone else.”